


Jar III

by LiquidFix



Series: Jar [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:55:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidFix/pseuds/LiquidFix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This time it’s not actually in a jar. Mentions of siblings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jar III

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://liquidfix.livejournal.com/14222.html). Although categorised as Sherlock/John, it is implied and not directly stated.

John did a double-take as he picked up that morning’s edition of The Times from the desk in the sitting room of 221b, for sitting next to his laptop was a plate covered in tin foil which he did not remember placing there.

“What’s this?” He asked, unwilling to lift the foil lest it be hiding a particularly unpleasant experiment.

From his armchair, Sherlock looked over for a second before going back to furiously typing on his laptop. “Lemon meringue pie.”

John frowned at the concealed dessert, immediately untrusting of Sherlock’s complete lack of interest in it. Sherlock had a sweet tooth. Any time John brought something back for himself; a French fancy, a strawberry tart - if he didn’t eat it there and then, Sherlock would discover it and it would disappear overnight. The lonely dessert on the desk set alarm bells off in John’s head.

“Why is there a lemon meringue pie sitting on my desk.” Said John moodily, imagining it to be laced with some sort of poison. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume so. His mind raced with a florid scenario in which Sherlock had tainted the dessert and then left it out for John to find, at which point the detective would sit and watch, taking notes as John went into a death-roll while foaming at the mouth.

“ _Our_ desk, actually.” Sherlock corrected, his fingers thrashing over the keys. “And there is a lemon meringue pie on it because Mrs Hudson sat it there a half hour ago. I’ve just not put it in the fridge yet.”

“And just why did you not let her put it in the fridge in the first place?” John asked, poking at the slightly-browned meringue top. “Actually, I don’t want to know why you wouldn’t let her open the door to it.”

He looked over at his flatmate and sneered at Sherlock’s smirk. At least he’d had the grace to warn the poor woman before she found herself face-to-face with a defrosting cat.

“Did she make it?”

“I think so. Is that important?”

“Not really,” John replied, replacing the cover and heading to his own armchair with the paper in hand. “It would just be a shame if she had, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Said John, throwing himself into his chair with a sigh. “I can’t stand lemon meringue pie. It’s the lemon curd, actually. Even the sight of it sets me off.”

Sherlock’s eyes were darting about the screen before stopping for a moment and peering at his flatmate, his fingers suspended in mid-air. “Lemon curd is delicious.” He said in a very matter-of-fact tone, as though he were reminding John that the sky was blue and the grass was green.

“Lemon curd is heinous.” John retorted adamantly. “For a start, it looks like pus.”

Forgetting his work, Sherlock stared at him openly, a sceptical look on his face. “Pus?”

“Yes, it looks like pus!” John replied quickly in a defensive tone.

“You really have a colourful imagination, John.”

Taking the statement as an insult directed at his writing(which coming from Sherlock Holmes, it more than likely was), John thrust the newspaper out in front of himself, blocking his companion’s wry grin from view.

“So, how do you make the link between lemon curd and pus?”

“I’m not talking about this, Sherlock.” Growled John, staring at the television listings intently.

“I really want to know.” The detective pushed, closing his laptop over and peaking his hands together.

“Because they are the same colour? Because they both taste disgusting?” John offered, knowing that it would not be nearly enough to put Sherlock off. Once the man had his teeth into something (why did John watch the national news but not the regional, why did John put milk in his coffee before hot water, why did John always put his right shoe on before his left) he was like a terrier carrying a stick that was three times bigger than its self but completely unwilling to let it go.

“There’s more than that.”

“How about I just don’t like the taste? That’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“When was the last time you tried it?”

John glowered at him from behind the safety of the paper. “I don’t know. A while ago.”

“How long ago? A couple of months?”

“You know damn well it’s not a couple of months. Has there been any in the kitchen? No, there hasn’t, you _genius_.”

He was being nasty, but John really didn’t want Sherlock to dig at his hatred of lemon curd. There was actually a very simple reason why he couldn’t stand the stuff, but he would be damned before he would tell Sherlock what it was.

“Years, then.” Sherlock suggested.

“Yes, years. And I’m still traumatised from it so please stop talking about lemon-bloody-curd. I’ll eat a bit of the meringue from the top as long as it isn’t a part that the lemon has interfered with.”

“Ah, that’s no good.” Said Sherlock, and John could almost _hear_ his grin widening as he continued to hide himself behind The Times.

“And just how is it ‘no good’?”

“Because I’m sure Mrs Hudson put lemon juice in the meringue mix.”

Throwing the paper down into his lap, John shot daggers alternately between the innocent dessert still residing on the desk and Sherlock, who’s mouth was twitching as though he was just about to deliver the punch line to a particularly bad joke.

“This is a conspiracy.” John grumbled.

“How? I didn’t know you didn’t like lemon, and neither did Mrs Hudson.”

“It’s not that I don’t like lemon, I just don’t like lemon _curd_. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“Yes, there is. I like lemon tea, I like lemon juice.”

“Then what’s so bad when it has been turned into curd?”

“Because,” Said John through pursed lips. “Harry loves it. _Really_ loves it, and every bloody weekend when we’d stay with our Gran, she’d feed us lemon curd sandwiches without fail. Not because _I_ liked them, but because they were Harry’s favourite and her, being the ‘golden child’, got what she wanted.”

John didn’t like talking about his sister. Not in the way that Sherlock would rather choke on his own tongue than use it to pronounce his brother’s name, but Harry had become one of those “no-go” subjects, much like Sherlock’s own childhood was. It wasn’t that John despised his sister either, but as soon as it was revealed his sibling was a raging alcoholic, the topic of conversation would twist away from John’s control and he would feel inferior to his elder sister, as he had for pretty much all of his life.

It had been that way ever since their childhood, when Harry discovered roll-ups. When their parents had found out she was smoking at the age of twelve, it was like she had robbed John of their attention. Then, when he was a little older and Harry had moved onto cider, their parents had tried to assure John that they treated them both equally; it was just that John was ‘the sensible one’, had his head screwed on. He didn’t need help, financial or emotional. He would go to university, become a doctor, earn plenty of money and live a quite life. Not like poor Harry, who needed all the support she could get. No matter what John accomplished in his life, it would always pale in comparison to one of Harry’s meltdowns. He could have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and he knew, deep down, that his parents would still go “Well done son, but did you know that your sister isn’t going to her therapy again?”.

Harry always had the priority. It didn’t matter if it was as a result of her behaviour or simply because accident of birth had dictated she had arrived first, but Harry’s needs always seemed to be more prevalent than John’s. He hadn’t hated lemon curd when he was younger, really. He’d quite liked it to begin with, when he stayed at his Grandmother’s house on a Saturday and she would give them thick-cut sandwiches brimming with it because Harry had said it was her absolute favourite food. John actually preferred jam, something he was never allowed at home as his parents were quite strict about sugar, but even when he asked his Gran for some instead of what Harry wanted, it never appeared and soon, John started to dislike the taste of lemon curd as much as he was growing to realise that no matter what how loud he screamed for something from his family, Harry would always scream louder.

It was why he had refused to live with his family when he had been discharged. When they’d first found out he’d been shot, they’d rushed to his bedside and of course, John had been relieved that his family seemed to care so much. But it was not long before their idle chatter would turn to the subject of his sister’s absence.

“Oh John, she’s in a bad way.” They’d say as they sat next to him, looking everywhere but at their injured son. “It’s her and Clara. She left, and now Harry’s worse than ever.”

John had answered as tersely as he could, all the while bitter that his parents seemed to think that Harry’s self-inflicted illness was somehow more important than the fact that their son had been shot and almost killed while trying to save other people’s lives. No one had forced Harry to start drinking, no one had held her down and forced a bottle into her. At the same time, John knew no one had forced him to join the Royal Army Medical Corps, and he certainly hadn’t done it to gain respect or interest from his family, but with Harry he knew that if their parents hadn’t kept giving her attention every time she threw an alcohol-related fit, there was a good chance she wouldn’t be in the state that she was.

“I became sick of it.” John said to Sherlock as he toyed with the paper. “And then I started to dread it, because Harry even admitted that she only did it because she knew I liked jam more and Gran would listen to her more than me.”

Sherlock nodded a little in reply but said nothing.

“It’s not even about lemon curd, really, if you know what I mean.”

Apparently Sherlock did, as he blinked slowly and tapped his fingers together gently, his face a picture of deep concentration.

“I know no one starts off taking something with the intention of becoming addicted,” He continued cautiously, vivid memories of his first night at Baker Street in his mind. “But she’s does it on purpose and knows exactly what she’s doing. If it wasn’t drink, it would be something else. She blames our parents, saying that she started it because she was scared of what they’d do to her when they found out she was a lesbian, but that’s total bullshit. She was pulling stunts when she was just a kid; anything to keep their attention for more than five minutes, and because she couldn’t rip my things to pieces or fight with me in front of Gran, she’d ask for those bloody lemon curd sandwiches, just to get at me!”

“He would do things like that.” Sherlock replied quietly after John’s outburst. “He couldn’t stand that I played the violin. He was tried with the piano, but he just cannot grasp music and he used to get so jealous. Then, there was a time when I was pushed into having lessons five days a week and I fell out with everyone over it, so he cut the strings on my violin.”

Suddenly the childish outbursts on the instrument when the elder Holmes came to visit made perfect sense to John.

“The bastard had waited until it got to the point where it would look as though I had cut them just to spite everyone, and he loved every second of it. No one would believe I hadn’t done it, because Mycroft was the _good_ one; he’d never do something as bad and childish as destroy his brother’s violin. And he _did_ do it, because it wasn’t enough for him to be brilliant at just the things he was. He wanted to be brilliant at _my_ things too.”

Contempt poured from Sherlock, and John listened intently. The younger man barely spoke about his life before Baker Street at all, apart from the odd comment about his grandmother, and he soaked up every word as though they were sacred vows.

Mycroft Holmes didn’t sit well with John. On paper, he was the success - job for life in government, sprawling, immaculate house in central London that was bought out-right. Sherlock, on the other hand, spent half the year officially unemployed and living in a rented flat with single-glazed windows, mould on the kitchen ceiling and a sometimes unemployed flatmate. John had not missed the hint of distaste in Mycroft’s voice during their first meeting, when the older man had flipped open his notebook and recited the address of 221 _b_ , as though living in just 221 wouldn’t have been such a black mark against the Holmes name.

John knew he wasn’t a failure himself, but it did not stop him from feeling it compared to his sister, just as it being judged a source of shame by his elder brother didn’t make Sherlock an embarrassment, and he now understood the reason why Sherlock would never ask for anything from Mycroft; not work, not money (John felt the same - almost - but was not proud enough to turn down the offer for a perfectly good smart phone from his sister, as he had had none of his own at the time). Mycroft offered these things because he wanted a hold over his brother, wanted a say in his life, and John could see that Sherlock knew that if he took them then his sibling would be able to turn to him and go “that is my money, you will spend it on what I say” or “I gave you this job, that effectively makes me your boss”.

Trying to control Sherlock’s actions was the ultimate exercise in futility, John knew. You could direct him, give him a bit of guidance, but Mycroft Holmes really could not have been as intelligent as he made himself out to be if he honestly thought that he could persuade his brother to change his life. John couldn’t even get him to put the dishes away - the idea of someone trying to get Sherlock to take up a proper ‘nine-to-five’ job was ridiculous beyond belief.

“I suppose you’re right, that I haven’t even tried it for years.” John said eventually, as they had both appeared to drift into their own little worlds. “I might like it.”

“You’d think of it though, your sister and all.” Replied Sherlock, looking small and child-like in his chair with his legs crossed beneath him and his hair askew.

“Still, it’s a shame that Mrs Hudson went to all the trouble of making the damn thing for it to sit there untouched, and I don’t have the heart to tell her I’d rather eat my own head than put a piece of that-” he nodded in the direction of the dish on the table. “-in my mouth.”

“You should. Otherwise she might assume you love it and it will become a weekly feature.”

John grimaced. It was bad enough that he sometimes thought of his sister when using his phone.

“Taste is a more powerful trigger for memory than sight is, John.” The consulting detective continued. “In fact, just about all the senses are. It took me months to break the new strings in on my violin after they were replaced, and even then they didn’t sound right. Every time I played it they whined, and I’d think of Mycroft whining that he didn’t do it with _that_ look on his fat face.”

“Did it ever go away, the thought of what he had done?”

“Oh, eventually.” Answered Sherlock. “When I cut the new strings myself.”

“Sherlock!” John gasped.

“What? It was the easiest way - the new strings were there because he had cut the old ones. Therefore, the newest strings would be there because I had cut the previous set.”

“You could have just, I don’t know, unwound them and took them off that way?” Said John, smiling despite himself. “Cutting them was a bit dramatic.”

“Not as dramatic as if I had cut Mycroft.” He replied with a serious look on his face. “Which believe me, I would have done had I not been in France at the time.”

John laughed loudly now. It came out like a bark, and it hit Sherlock full-on, who shook his head as though he were being snapped from the mental image of assaulting his brother with a pair of scissors.

“So what are we going to do about that thing on the table?” He said. “I really don’t want to eat it.”

“I’ll have it.” Replied Sherlock, still serious.

“What, _all_ of it?!”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Sherlock said with a shrug. “You don’t want it and Mrs Hudson made it specifically for us.”

“Oh God.”

“Is that bad?”

“Of course it is.”

“I can’t see how, if I’m going to eat it. It’s not like it’s going in the bin.”

Shaking his head lightly, John picked up the paper again and absently flicked through it. “It’s no wonder your teeth haven’t fallen out of your head yet.”

Faking offence, Sherlock pouted. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“All you ever eat is sugar, in all of its many forms.”

“That’s not true. I had toast this morning.”

“That was thirteen hours ago, Sherlock, and it was slathered in marmalade.”

“Well then,” He said, standing with his laptop in his hands. “We’d better go out so as to make sure I eat something proper.”

“I thought you were going to demolish that dessert so I didn’t have to look at it?”

“I can still do that.” Replied Sherlock, placing his laptop on the desk next to the plate and lifting his scarf from the back of the chair. “Or…”

“Or what?”

“Or I could forget to put it in the fridge and it would be spoiled by the time we got back from dinner?”

John stood now, throwing the newspaper onto his armchair. “Brilliant. Amazing, actually. I take it we’ve to run down the stairs dramatically as though we’re off to do something incredibly important, slam the door on the way out?”

“A nice touch.” Sherlock said in reply, turning to John and resting a hand on his shoulder with a smile. “And I can’t really think of anything more important right now than dinner out with you and a long walk afterwards.”


End file.
